Flashback Scenes
by Wild Iris
Summary: Miscellaneous drabbles that have a pre series setting in common. They feature Angel[us] and various other characters.
1. Red

**Red**

Blood is easy to obtain in the Depression; pigs are being butchered everywhere. And the men who speak passionately at the crossroads tell him that he has the right to what he needs.

They also want him to give back what he can – by which he's not sure what, or why. Occasionally, when he feels faint guilt at the farmers' desperation, he sleeps in barns and makes the rats flee from the smell of death.

Come dusk he moves on. The campaigners stack their pamphlets, ready to return another day. Somewhere they see more than hurried meals and scanty reparation.


	2. Le Vampyr

**Le Vampyr**

Away from her, who makes each night unique, he finds the kill predictable. One cannot always be hungry. And the city offers other distractions, other ways to spin out one's time.

He sits on the terrace at the Brasserie des Martyrs, where late hours and white skin excite no comment. The poet is often there, writing with a glass beside him, and even through the absinthe his eyes penetrate the void of Angelus' soul.

"_Figure en lame de couteau_," the poet whispers when they meet. Then he leans forward, as though to give instruction: "_Monsieur, cette sensation, elle s'appelle l'ennui_."


	3. Fallen

**Fallen**

Sinners babble. Sinners like the thousand thousand men who built the tower to pierce the heavens; and she tries to pray, "Hail, Mary, full of grace," but all she sees is the snake Papa killed in the woodshed, green, wet, slithering through Eden, teeth sharpened to a tearing point. Mary, mother. Pain and blood beneath her. Her postulant's white dress thrown aside among the dead things.

Shifting, it leans over her, the devil come for her, and she sobs the only mercy she remembers, "Let he who is without sin — ". It promises that she will wake again in hell.


	4. Emergency

**Emergency**

Mr White gasps as the school nurse binds his foot, trying not to look at the bloodied instrument tossed aside on the counter. The scissors were supposed to have blunted blades, safe for children, but they had penetrated deeply enough.

She pulls the bandage tight. "You should be fine in a few days. How on earth did this happen?"

"They must have fallen – open – ". He isn't sure; the pain came out of nowhere. He'd leaned over the desk, picked up the blank sheet of paper. Asked Bethany why she hadn't drawn an Easter rabbit like the others.


	5. Pick me up

**Pick-me-up**

He double-checks as each walks past, but it's more or less a reflex. Even amidst head-splitting nausea straight from the primary school version of hell, you don't forget the face of a woman who looks like that. Still less the faces of _two_ women who look like that.

They haven't survived this long by seeking trouble. When Lily sees the tipsy Irishman in the doorway of their diner, muttering while one hand clutches his forehead, she tugs at Ricky's sleeve: _"let's go."_ There's another coffee shop across the street; the food is lousy, she remembers, but the service is fast.


	6. Stations

**Stations**

He murmurs when the sweet waist half-turns, because she knows he is following her; and again when he sees her face under the shadow of the bonnet. How else should she look but like the Madonna?

_Is it she on whom you model yourself? She was ravished and none believed her. Now she is a legend._

She is terrified and rapt. As she sees what he will do to her he sees it, too; knows how to recreate those expressions on her face and finally break them, break them utterly; leaving her laughing, leaving her spinning, leaving her wanting him.


	7. Unction

**Unction**

"Confess it: this is what you yearned for."

She is laid out as he had always pictured, on the high altar.

"The flesh preserved without corruption. Unchanged at burial. The priest wonders that he smells flowers – "

Her small hands pressed together, prayerful, on her breast. A scattering of violets, plucked from the garden while Darla hung back at the door.

"Perhaps he talks with the sexton. 'Could she be…?' 'Is it possible?' 'In our quiet bit of London?'

"And for the miracles – " He kisses her lips, still soft. "Under my tutoring, you shall perform so many."


	8. Causeway

**Causeway**

_(The Giant's Causeway, Co. Antrim)_

He asks what made those stepping stones across the sea.

His father says, God, and bids him be quiet. But Cathleen, undressing him for bed, tells him the story of the great battle.

He lies awake. He pictures being far too grown to be clouted ever, leaping across the rocks, not heeding the call to come home, his boots making new doors and pillars in the earth.

He doesn't ask where Ireland's giants went; doesn't wonder if, being gone, they might have met one greater. Before the family wakes, he has gone to dip his fingers in the wild foam.


	9. Requiescat

**Requiescat**

The church is packed; three from one family, of course, and all that weirding talk beforehand. Plenty of folk being all ears.

A shame the young master and his da didn't reconcile, she says. Families weren't made for bitterness. Some were whispering that's why the master died, that he'd gone mad with guilt. You could only pray for their poor souls.

Even now, how would they find each other at the judgement? One grave robbed, and all so afraid the ground was cursed that the master couldn't have the plot he'd paid for.

Eh, God's ways are strange, she says.


	10. Selection

**Selection**

They explain they can't take a sister and a brother. They're lying, though. She sees it in their eyes. She's only seven, but she knows stuff.

She balls her fists. She doesn't want to cry, watching another white couple drive away from the orphanage. And she'd never go nowhere without Charles. It doesn't matter she can taste what they have for breakfast, feel the car seats, see the house with a gate they must live in.

"Try to have patience, Alonna," Miz Edmond says. "One day, you'll have a daddy again. And your new daddy will be just as nice."


	11. Assumption

**Assumption**

Her man would have a velvet weskit and the laughingest eyes. He'd steal a lock from her hair, because it was so pretty.

A child's dream. He'd be gentle and honest and do work among the poor. On Sundays they'd walk to church, her arm in his arm.

Vanity! Who could love her? Only the Lord ever might; only He could save her from the devil that tempted her woman-weak heart.

She was His bride. No other's.

Sister Ambrose is about to cut her hair. In he walks, throwing the doors aside: the one in velvet with the laughing eyes.


	12. Mortification

**Mortification**

She had never scrubbed a floor while Mama was alive. But she seizes all the chores they give her, and buries herself in the labour, hour on hour.

Cleansing the dirt from the pure, white stone until her knuckles bleed. Afterwards, permitted to join the sisters at prayer, knowing that she can remain always with them once she's scrubbed it all. Washing the whiteness with her blood and drying it with her hair...

"Novice, that's enough for today. Go and see Sister in the infirmary about your hands." Only then does she get up from the streaming floor and stop.


End file.
